Competing Confessions: Religious Rivalries in New Spain's Cities

Cities brought branches of the church, including New Spain's religious orders and diocesan clergy into close proximity. Tight quarters and different ideas about how Catholicism should best be put into practice meant cities teemed with competing ideas about how to go about the process of achieving salvation. This paper examines how different branches of the church sought to put their distinctive stamps on urban religious practice as well as how the laity viewed these practices. Its point of entry to the subject is the act of confessing as it was carried out during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Sacrament of Penance was the subject of intense theological debate, and theologians laid out different criteria for successfully cleansing the soul of sin. What did these differences mean in practice to the churchmen hearing confessions and to the people making them? Although much of what happened in the confessional remains veiled by the seal of confession, the historical record includes instances of priests arguing about what made for a good confession and laypeople discussing which regimen was best. Contemporaries, it turns out, recognized that the experience of confessing in one church could be very different than the experience of confessing in another.